with Michael Toms [MT] and Dr. Robert Moore [RM]
MT: It is only through a change in human consciousness that the world will be transformed. The personal and the planetary are connected. As we expand our awareness of body, mind, psyche and spirit, so also will the world be changed. This is our quest as we explore new dimensions!
In this world of increasing global awareness, it is obvious that most of the world's leaders are male. If we needed further evidence, the women's movement has, among other things, made us all aware of the limitations of patriarchy. Over the past several years, throughout the United States, men have been gathering together to drum, to talk, to feel themselves in new ways. The search for a deeper masculine self has begun through workshops, lectures, group rituals, wilderness retreats and more. The present patriarchal model is under serious challenge as men attempt to create fuller and more meaningful and connected lives. Today we will explore the nature of the Men's Movement with our guest Robert Moore.
Robert Moore is an internationally recognized Jungian psychoanalyst who is a training analyst of the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago. Professor of Psychology and Religion at the Chicago Theological Seminary. A well known author, editor and lecturer, in addition to his private practice in Chicago and Evanston, Illinois, he lectures widely to both national and international audiences on such topics as masculine psychology, human spirituality and psychology, psychoanalysis, myth and ritual. He has participated with Robert Bly and Michael Mead as a lecturer in a series of Men's conferences across the United States. He's the senior editor of a new Paulist Press book series on Jungian psychology and world spirituality, and the co-author of the book, along with Douglas Gillette, minister- mythologist, of a book entitled King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine. Join us for the next hour as we probe the depths of the emerging male in America as we go towards the 21st century. My name is Michael Toms, I'll be your host. Welcome to New dimensions. Robert, welcome.
RM: It's a pleasure to be here with you.
MT: In my introduction, I mentioned the Men's Movement and I think, as a beginning question, I'd like to ask you about, "Why do you think a Men's Movement started? Where do you think it comes from? What was the motivation for it - the impetus for it?"
RM: Well, Michael Mead and Robert Bly are fond of saying that it's really, in a way, too early to talk about "a" Men's Movement - but, it's not too early to say that there surely is a lot of ferment and activity among men today that you saw documented in Bly's tape. In Moyer's interview with Bly, "A Gathering of Men." Some people say that it's a response to the Women's Movement. I think that's partially so. I don't see it as a reaction against the women's movement in any way. I think that it may be that what we have begun - what we see now, is the beginning of an attempt for men to be consciously masculine in a way that they have not been since tribal cultures.
MT: And what about the kind of activities that men are engaged in? Why drumming, for an example?
RM: Well, I think one of the things that we ought to talk about today is the whole concept of initiation today. The recovery of interest in human initiation - both feminine initiation and masculine initiation. One of the things we know about that is that there is always a mythic and a ritual context to initiation processes. And, what we're seeing today I believe, and I want to hope, that what we're seeing is an attempt to rediscover wisdom that used to be very much consolidated in tribal cultures that has been lost in modern culture. So the drumming - the drumming is not something that's there by itself. The drumming is done in the context of story telling. And of the recounting of mythology from many different human wisdom traditions. And when I - what I am touched by and impressed by as I go around the country, is the way in which men are drawing on the wisdom of different mythological traditions in what we like, in the men's movement today, to see as sacred space. The transformative space of gathering together for a heightened awareness of ourselves and our world. So the drumming is in a ritual context. And there are many new books out now that describe the significance of drumming in ritual process.
MT: I think of Mickey Hart's book Drumming at the Edge of Magic which is ...
RM: It's an excellent book. And there's another one that's less widely known, but that should be read widely, it's by Lawrence Sullivan, the new Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard, and it's called Icanchu's Drum and it shows the importance and the relationship between drumming and the making of a world.
MT: Certainly one of the things that - I mean, the fact that the drumming is associated in a ritual context, with various rituals from cultures throughout the world, I mean, that sort of points to the absence of ritual in our culture. We don't have much ritual, do we?
RM: Certainly we have pseudo-ritual - people are constantly trying to find ways to bind the - what I like to call archetypal or even the gold energy - that's in us. In other words, we human beings have a Great Self within and it is loaded with energies that are very difficult to relate to in a healthy way without ritual. And, I think there is no other way, Michael, today to understand the addiction problem; the problems of acting out that we see in violent behaviors, and so forth, unless we look at the absence of ritual in our society - healthy ritual.
MT: I think that you mentioned - pseudo-ritual - I think of the ritual of the cocktail party - that would be a pseudo-ritual wouldn't it?
RM: Yes, that's kind of what I would call a kind of a lover ritual - a lover space ritual. And we'll get into the different inner spaces in a little bit, I think. But that's a kind of an attempt to get into the garden within -- and it's such an unconscious way that addiction often follows.
MT: These images - certainly the images that are conjured up in the book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, the idea of archetypes… I think it might be useful for you to explain or describe, define "archetype" and how we're all effected by those archetypal images.
RM: Well, I like to try to use ways of getting at that that communicate to our generation in a way that make it clear that these are not concepts that are merely sort of mystical or in some way irrelevant to practical, every day life. In my view we can think of these archetypal patterns - what Carl Jung called primordial images - as really relating to important sectors of the neuro-physiological functioning of human beings. In this respect I think we have to look at the work of Anthony Stevens, and particularly his book, Archetypes and Natural History of the Self, and some of his other work to understand that human instinct is organized. And the human psyche is organized and has deep structures. You know the work of Chomski on deep linguistic structures. There's a lot more research today that makes it very clear that the brain and human mental and emotional functioning is organized through deep structures. These deep structures are what I talk about as archetypes. And, an easy way to think about them is to think about them as important programs for human emotional, behaviorial and mental functioning. And I like, and what we'll talk about a little later, I think, is the way my decoding of some of these programs and the relationship between them.
MT: So these programs operate essentially at an unconscious level.
RM: Yes - in other words, I like to say that these programs - particularly these four major programs - are in the hard wiring. Cultures and families give us a lot of the software, but I think, if you study, as I have, cross-cultural mythology, comparative anthropology, primate ethology, and so forth, we see that when the ancients said that there were four elements - that there were - the Navahos said that there were four great snakes - four mountains, four rivers, etc. And, when Carl Jung talked about the centrality of the quadrated psyche - this is not just a fantasy of Carl Jung. This is something that there's enormous evidence to substantiate - cross- culturally.
MT: So that's why the book itself only has four.
RM: That's right. In other words, there are many, many archetypes but what we have focused on (Douglas Gillette and I) in these series of books that are forthcoming, is the four - what we feel to be the four fundamental cornerstones that a mature self (either masculine or feminine) is built upon. And, you see, if you get out the 20th volume of Jung's Collected Works and look at the enormous evidence that he has compiled there for the four-fold nature of the human self - it is staggering. And what Jung never did do, however, which I think has been done now, in this work, is to decode what energies - what potentials - lie in the four quadrants. And we believe that these, for the male psyche, these are the four powers.
MT: I'm speaking with Robert Moore, co-author of the book King, Warrior, Magician Lover. We're going to continue our exploration of maleness in the latter part of the 20th century in just a moment. Robert, did I understand you correctly, that these four archetypes also operate within women - not just men?
RM: Well, I think that… let me just do a brief comment on the way I think the deep self is structured. You know Jung and Freud both believed that the deep self was bi-sexual in some way -- that there was both masculine and feminine in the deep self. Jung, in fact had a diagram that you can look at if you look at volume 9.2 in the Collected Works. It is the quaternio - the image is really two pyramids base to base. We believe, and there are diagrams in the book, and we will elaborate other diagrams as we bring out the rest of the series - we believe that the reason human beings have been so fascinated with pyramidal structures in history is because of this diamond body within. In other words, what Buddhists have called the Diamond Body - we really believe that double quaternio that Jung talked about is the inner structure-- the crystalline structure of the deep self.
Now one of these pyramidal structures we believe to be the female model -- the blueprint for the female self and one of them, the blueprint for the masculine self. Later on we will be doing more writing on the way in which these articulate together. The four powers - you would say that in the female self there is a Queen - the female warrior, the female magician and the female lover. And this is fascinating. One of the things, for those of your audience, I know many of your audience are interested in the history of mythology and comparative religion, one of the Egyptian creation stories is that at the beginning there were four couples - there were four couples at the creation of the world. And I am amazed at the way in which this reflects what a decoding of this double quaternio - this octahedral shape of the deep self - is like.
So, in other words, the individual man has to build his conscious, little "s" self based on the blueprint of the masculine side of the big "S" Self. And the woman, in a similar way, has got to do that with the structure of the female side of the self. Now of course, those with Jungian interest would be aware that this means that there is a deep pyramidal contrasexual part of the self that is deep in the unconscious that Jungians call, for a man, the anima- the female side of him; and for a woman the animus- the male side of her. So you can get a much more full sense of the deep crystalline structures that are in the blueprints of the self if you work with that. Jung understood that there was this octahedral shape to the self. What he had not quite done was to decode what the facets were. And we believe that this work that we're doing has decoded that structure.
MT: Robert, I want you to translate what you just said for the non-Jungian - what that actually means as those of our listeners out there listening to you, I can just see, kind of the density, hearing what you are saying. "Well, how does that apply to me?" "How do I work with that?"
RM: OK, let me just put that in ordinary language here. What this means is that in every man and in every woman there are four fundamental psychological programs built into their personality, which, if they are to become mature, fully functioning human beings, they're going to learn how to access those -- to utilize them appropriately and to be able to balance them against each other. Let me just give you - see, the good news for human beings is that there are only four of these programs. The bad news is that there are two tensions - two dialectical oppositions that are built into our self. One of them is between the lover and the warrior; and one of them is between the king or the queen and the magician side of the self.
Very simply, let me just say that just like the ancients believed, these four things, these four powers, these four elements cannot be mixed. In other words they are eternally in a kind of a dynamic tension with each other. So, in other words, the lover in Michael Toms doesn't really like the warrior in Michael Toms, and never will. And the warrior feels the same way about the lover. And the king side of Michael Toms has a tension, a sort of eternal tension with the magician or the prophet or the clown or the trickster side of Michael Toms. So, as you struggle to balance these things, it takes enormous effort. As Jung always emphasized the moral achievement of human maturation - the incredible struggle it took to have a mature self. And I think we can see here, in this structure, it's simple, but not easy, in other words. And we'll be seeing as we talk today some of the very practical implications of being too much in the lover program or too much in the warrior program.
MT: Here we are in the early part of 1991 and clearly one of the archetypes that's operating in the world in a large way, is the warrior. And I can immediately see the dichotomy between the warrior and the lover, when you say, here's warriors having to go out and kill people and yet these are the same warriors that also have women and children, have wives and babies. So, there's an immediate dichotomy right there.
RM: Absolutely. There is no way for us to understand the tension and the conflict in the middle east without understanding the way in which the mythology of the middle east tends to highlight this warrior space within the psyche - this warrior energy. Let me just take a moment to just say, when this program, this warrior program comes up in the human psyche, what comes with it? You know Sam Keen recently did an interesting book on the face of the enemy. One of the things which happens when this warrior circuitry comes up in the human self is an enemy. There is always the splitting into the forces of - here's the way it goes in myth - the forces of chaos and the forces of cosmos, or world. And so, when I experience this warrior program, I will experience myself as the champion of world - of order, of justice and peace. And I will experience my enemy as the agent of chaos and annihilation of the world.
And there is a really fascinating book which lays this out in a technical way for anyone who has interest in pursuing this. It's a book by a man by the name of Forsythe. It's entitled The Old Enemy. And it is a discussion of the combat myths cross-culturally. They parallel each other cross-culturally. And the tragedy of the situation in the mid east is that there are so many people who are trying to be valiant warriors in the service of what they see as their tribe's vision, but we can see what happens with human beings when people get into this warrior experience and they have a tribal vision. Because you get perfectly wonderful, valiant, courageous human beings fighting for an outmoded vision.
MT: I'm thinking of George Bush accusing Saddam Hussein of being a Hitler and Saddam Hussein accusing George Bush of being a Satan. So here we have this operating, right?
RM: Absolutely. And you see it - the whole mythology of Armeggedon.. You know there are many, many people around the world today who are sort of, out of a tribal, sort of fundamentalistic vision - either a Muslim fundamentalism or a Christian fundamentalism or a Jewish fundamentalism - that are longing for this last battle because they have this vision - they have this feeling within them that if this last battle is engaged then a just and peaceful order will come out of it. So you can see the mythological structure behind this.
MT: Just hearing Hussein's statement "the Mother of all Battles has been joined" I mean, there it is. Right there.
RM: There it is right there. And this, Michael, let me just relate this situation to sort of the last challenge of Joseph Campbell, because, in Campbell's late book, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space he was pointing to this tendency of human tribal commitments to be the enormous problem of the human race in creating inter-group conflict. And he was calling upon us to try to take a vast step in human history - in the history of human consciousness in trying to have a post-tribal vision. A post-tribal understanding, for example, of what would a post-tribal warrior be like? And, you know, I think there are some hints about that today. One, which your readers, I mean your listeners, probably all are familiar with is the concept of the Rainbow Warrior - which has been used by Greenpeace to focus energy into the ecological struggle. But, the problem here, as Campbell saw, is these tribal visions - tribal mythologies, which are used fundamentalistically.
MT: Yeah, I think another thing that Joe envisioned was, I mean, no one can predict the next mythology, but he talked about that it would most likely be a planetary-wide one. This global vision - the global awareness coming on - and that almost precludes the tribal - and makes the tribal secondary.
RM: What I think he was getting at, and what I think is the way, in fact this is very important to see some of the things that are happening among men today. You know, we have always sort of been told that people coming out of these distinct spiritual traditions or mythic traditions - we've been told, they won't be able to cooperate with each other. You know - but, it's very interesting what we are seeing in men's gatherings around the country now. I've been very touched to see Jewish men listening to Muslim men share their wisdom about the human challenges today. To see Buddhist men sharing their wisdom with Christian men - to sit with a group of men from all sorts of different mythological traditions and spiritual traditions and to have them reverently be led in prayer by a young Sikh man. It is a powerful experience to see this kind of cooperation - to learn from each other. They said that couldn't be done but yet we're seeing that done widely among men today.
MT: Yeah, it's also another thing interesting about it is, that kind of coming together again, precludes the idea of - you almost get the idea there must be a number of gods hanging around there - there's one side praying for God and another side praying for God and God's on our side - God's on our side. Whose side is God really on?
RM: That's an interesting thing and that's a good place, Michael for us to raise the issue or the question of this king program.
MT: Let's do that in just a minute here as we take a break here. I want to mention that we're recording this interview three days into the Gulf War so, in case there are changes that happen after this recording you'll understand. But we do want to make reference to it because no one is really talking about the mythic dimensions of what's happening in the mideast and it's so very important because these are the unconscious drives that are allowing this to unfold, the way it's unfolding. I'm speaking with Robert Moore, the co-author with Douglas Gillette of King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. We're going to be right back in one minute.
MT: Robert you were about to go into the King.
RM: Yes, it's a fascinating thing to really get into this king or queen programming in the human psyche. Once you get into it, it is just amazing to see what potential is in that and to understand the difficulties we have with this program today in relationship to some of our problems. This one that you're mentioning now, this tendency for people to - when we see Hussein trying to feel that he's doing what he's doing out of loyalty to Allah. And others, for example Pres. Bush taking Billy Graham with him to the White House and having a prayer service, and so forth…in these traditions, if you study them carefully, particularly the traditions related to the book - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - there is a king mythology behind their theology. And, it's very interesting - the king mythology and the king program in the psyche is the part of the psyche that tries to include everything. It is the part of the psyche that is the most inclusive and leaves nothing out. If you look at Christian mythology - there's no way to understand Christian mythology without understanding this king mythology.
For example the stories that Jesus told about the good shepherd, who if there were 99 sheep in the fold and only one that was still lost, he would go after the lost one. That is the image of the good king. And, if you think about what is happening in the mideast you see the way in which this warrior program continues to divide. There's not much king program being accessed well there. The king is not really lord of all. You see, Allah has been made into the king of the Muslims, and so forth. The tendency of religions has been to take the king - the true king program, which is the program to include all, and make that into a tribal partial reality. So that the warrior - the warrior starts fighting, the warrior is not really fighting for an inclusive vision, under that kind of splitting.
So, that is one expression of an inadequate connection with this positive side of the king program. There's another one that we see in our cities - this middle east thing is not the only reflection of a lack of an inclusiveness in the human psyche. Look at the cavalier attitude that so many have toward homelessness in our cities -- the quickness with which people write these homeless off. One of the things that we do with men in workshops is to connect them with this king program is to have them get into the various myths and stories and, as the ancients did, have them imagine themselves looking through the eyes of the king. And, one exercise that we suggest that men do is to walk the streets of their home city and imagine themselves the king and see how they feel as they look out through the eyes of the king as they see what's happening to their people. And men find this to be an incredibly powerful experience when they can experience the king within and how the king within feels about those who have been left out - those who have been excluded - those who have not been valued. So we see a lot of expressions of this.
Back to the middle east thing - when this king program is not related to in a positive way it's easy for the Arab to not see the Jew as human. To not see the Jew as needing to have a place - and vice versa. It's easy when the Jew is into a more tribal myth - it's easy for them not to feel much about the concerns of the Palestinians. And so, you can see the way in which, if this inclusive, caring, nurturing, blessing king program is not being accessed in a mature way, we get this easy capacity to write people off and not to be concerned about them.
MT: What about the apparent rabid following of - looking at Hussein, he really functions in some way - has the appearance of a king - absolute dictator, absolute potentate… in some sense his followers are really giving up their king to him.
RM: Absolutely - that's a brilliant point Michael, and this is something that's very important for the listeners to really reflect about. This king - the true king is an inner king. And the tendency, if someone has not really developed - you know Jung talked about it as individuation - today we would talk about it as maturation. Mythologically we talk about it as initiation - but the core of that is getting the capacity to remove these projections of our own inner potentials from external human beings. These are numinous, magical, powerful, mythic realities that are within the deep self. And when we are not in touch - this is the way we can look at it. When a man is not in touch with his inner king he will tend to project that on a man. Men make very bad kings. The only true king is the king that a man meets in the deepest parts of his soul.
MT: So that goes a long ways to explaining where this kind of - again the depersonalization comes from - the rabid following - giving over the power to someone else means you don't have to make your own decisions about it.
RM: That's right, you have no real - you don't really have your own center because you have projected your center out into the external world. You do not, therefore, have responsibility. The buck does not stop with you. The Iraqis are not the only people who do this. You see this in our culture, for example, the way in which we keep expecting the leaders to come along and solve it all. We keep waiting, you know, we keep waiting for someone else to come along who will, in an almost magical fantasy, who will fix everything.
You know, throughout world mythology there is this theme of the return of the king, which is an enormously potent mythical structure. You see it everywhere from Tolkein's Lord of the Rings to the different mythical traditions of the human race. But this return of the king, I'm convinced, if there is going to be a return of the king that's really going to lead to this kind of planetary transformation in human consciousness, it's going to be the return of the king within. That is, men are going to become aware that there is something within them that is very royal but that is not their conscious ego.
If a man identifies - now this is something for those who are interested in psychology and psychopathology - when a man identifies with the king within in a primitive way he becomes a narcissistic personality. In other words, any time you see a man who expects everybody to adore him - sort of kneel at his feet - and there are many that way - that's a man who hasn't made a distinction between himself as a human self and this inner program. So the goal is a subtle one. It is to be able to be in touch with this king program to, in effect, know the king within - not project it out on to a President or to a dictator, but not to identify with it so that the I or the ego is inflated, or grandiose.
MT: It also explains in a deep way why so many women have pointed to men and said, "hey, you're just not doing it right it here.." Because they are recognizing that absence of the inner connection, right?
RM: Absolutely, in fact - there is so much talk today about dysfunctional families - you know - in other words, this king program doesn't go away when one doesn't relate to it in a mature way - what it does is it expresses itself always in its shadow forms - its dysfunctional, immature forms. We call that, in this book, the shadow king. And the shadow king acts a lot like a sort of a boy king. We call it the high chair tyrant. And he will alternately be abusive of his power in relationships in the family and then impotent and abdicating of his rightful responsibilities in the family. And so all this talk about dysfunctional families, you can see as in part a problem that men have in relating in a healthy and mature way to this kingly side of themselves.
MT: I think of something Joe Campbell used to say about politicians - that - when he looked at politicians he saw just a group of troubled adolescents.
RM: Absolutely, and, you know, that today, looking at our situation in this country and around the world, it makes us very sad when we get past our denial, and we look at the extent to which that is true. Absolutely, literally true - in other words Golding's book The Lord of the Flies is really a statement about our condition on this planet at this time. Recently, just a few days ago, it was uncanny, in fact. It was on the January 15th date - which was the deadline on this middle east situation -and a group of men - Douglas Gillette, Forrest Craver, from Wingspan magazine, and I, were at the Viet Nam war memorial and we were looking at all of these young men who had been betrayed by their elders and led into a situation in which they became the sacrificial victims of immature politicians who had no real generative vision for either country - or for the world. But this is widespread. It's not just an American problem. Leaders - think of Marcos in the Philippines - and think of Norreiga - there have been so many men who are in posit
